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No Solutions to Problems Like These

"In the new Congress, we are encountering a severe backlash against essential environmental safeguards. Under the guise of reining in federal spending, anti-environmental forces are attempting to gut the enforcement of federal protections and to put the brakes on EPA just as it was beginning to make real progress...." - Frederick Middleton, Southern Environmental Law Center, US

"Writing this Report has been a disheartening process. ...the bad and the positively ugly indisputably outweigh the good. At this stage, the likelihood of the Coalition Government living up to its 'Greenest Government Ever' pledge is vanishingly remote. ...it is clear that that the ‘growth at all costs’ lobby has won out over the advocates of ‘sustainable economic development’.... " - Jonathon Porritt, Forum for the Future, UK

"For 17 years, officials from nearly 200 countries have gathered under the auspices of the United Nations to try to deal with one of the most vexing questions of our era — how to slow the heating of the planet. ... Every year they fail to significantly advance their own stated goal of keeping the average global temperature from rising more than 2 degrees Celsius ...above preindustrial levels." - John Broder, New York Times

It's a grim situation.

Environmentalists are making some progress, like reducing local pollution, setting aside conservation parts, and saving some species from extinction. At the international level we've solved the stratospheric ozone hole problem. This was a tremendous victory.

However, we are winning a few battles but losing the war.

The sad truth is that traditional approaches like grassroots campaigns, lobbying for stricter regulations, enforcement of existing laws, and trying to elect "better" politicians are simply not working on the sustainability problem as a whole.

So what can we do?

We can take a different approach by changing how we solve problems.

The approach begins with the realization that:

All problems arise from their root causes

A root cause is the deepest cause in a causal chain that can be resolved. If the deepest cause in a causal chain cannot be resolved, it's not a real problem. It's the way things are.

Millions of people have worked on the sustainability problem for generations. Countless and frequently brilliant solutions have been tried. While some have worked at the local level, and a few have worked at the international level like the ozone hole problem, none have worked at the systemic level.

Why?

Because popular solutions do not resolve root causes.

Systemic means affecting most or all of a system rather than a small portion of the system. Nearly the entire human population is behaving unsustainably, so the sustainability problem is clearly a systemic problem. It therefore requires systemic solutions, ones that makes deep fundamental changes to the system by resolving the root causes. There is no other way.

Systemic solutions resolve root causes. A systemic solution is the same thing as a root cause solution. Systemic solutions change the fundamental way a system works by changing the structure of its key feedback loops. For example:

The solution to the autocratic ruler problem was democracy. The root cause of despicable autocratic rulers like kings, warlords, and dictators was there was no easy way for an oppressed population to replace a bad ruler with a good one. Democracy resolved the root cause with addition of the voter feedback loop.

Consider the recurring wars in Europe problem. Its root cause was excessive competition over limited resources. This was resolved by the European Union, which created feedback loops binding all members of the union together, primarily via free trade within a single common market.

Note how popular sustainability solutions are nowhere near as fundamental as the above two solutions. Also note the elegant simplicity of the two solutions.

A grassroots activism campaign is not a systemic solution. Neither is lobbying to get new regulations passed. Neither is enforcement of existing laws to get polluters to clean up their act. These are not systemic solutions because they don't change the system in a fundamental manner by resolving root causes. Instead, they change one little thing in the system. They are thus incremental solutions that whack away at intermediate causes.

They are also symptomatic solutions, because they treat the symptoms rather than the root causes. For example, the Sierra Club's Beyond Coal campaign in the US seeks to end construction of new coal power plants and retire the rest. It's a symptomatic solution because all those coal plants are symptoms of a deeper problem. WHY isn't industry aggressively looking for more sustainable energy? WHY do environmental NGOs have to sue to get existing laws enforced. Isn't that something government should be doing?

Questions like these reveal there are deeper causes. A series of additional WHY questions would ultimately lead to theroot causes of the sustainability problem. These are the causes environmentalists need to be addressing because all problems arise from their root causes.

Systemic problems requires systemic solutions, because only a systemic solution can resolve a root cause.

Let's put on our systems thinking hats and get started on finding those solutions.

The graph shows we're not doing too well on solving the environmental sustainability problem. The world's ecological footprint crossed what one planet can support sometime in the 1970s. It's now at about 50% overshoot and growing, with not the slightest sign of turning downward.

The six dots show some of the world's best efforts to solve the problem. But despite these efforts the footprint keeps right on marching upward. Footprint growth has become as unstoppable as a runaway elephant.

Why is this? Why, despite over 40 years of prodigious effort, has the human system failed to solve the sustainability problem?

That's the question Thwink.org asked in 2001 when we begin working on the problem. After quite a struggle due to the overwhelming complexity of the problem, we've come to a conclusion. The reason for solution failure is the right tools are not being applied. Fortunately this is easily corrected by switching to the right tools, just as so many fields of science and business have done once they figured out what tools they needed to solve their central problems.

Thwink.org offers a comprehensive approach to solving the sustainability problem. It's an analytical, tool driven, systemic approach. Here's a comparison of the present approach and the analytical approach:

Present Approach

1. Intuitive due to its strategy of:
- Find the truth (the direct solutions)
- Promote the truth (about the solutions)
- If that fails, magnify the truth (inspiration)

2. Not working because it doesn't resolve the root causes of the problem.

3. No deep analysis of the complete problem, so solutions must be intuitively derived.

4. Leads to superficial solutions that tend to fail because they target intermediate rather than root causes.

3. Deep analysis of the complete problem, so solutions can be rationally derived.

4. Leads to systemic solutions with a high probability of success because each solution resolves a systemic root cause.

To summarize, present approaches use an intuitive approach that stops at intermediate causes. This leads to pushing on low leverage points with superficial solutions. By contrast the analytical approach uses analysis to find the root causes. This leads to pushing on high leverage points with systemic solutions. The global environmental sustainability problem is clearly a difficult systemic problem if there ever was one, so only the analytical approach can solve it.

If you feel the present approach can work then you will find little of interest on this website, because absolutely nothing here takes the intuitive approach.

On the other hand, if you feel an analytical approach could do better, and possibly a lot better, then you will find Thwink.org to be an information rich, educational storehouse of knowledge designed to help you solve your problems. But beware. The new approach is completely different from the old one. It's as different as alchemy and science, and the Dark Ages and The Renaissance. That's why we say:

Welcome to a Whole New Way of Thwinking

What follows is a brief introduction to the analytical approach:

Solving a problem begins with defining it. In 1972 The Limits to Growth project and book defined the global environmental sustainability problem so convincingly it provoked the world into thinking about the TOTAL problem and the necessity of solving it. The key analysis tool was system dynamics modeling. This allowed understanding system behavior that had never been deeply and correctly understood before.

The first step - The Limits to Growth took the all-important first step of defining the sustainability problem in its totality. However, four decades later our problem remains unsolved. It continues to grow worse with no overall solution in sight, despite countless attempts at local, national, and international levels to solve the problem.

The second step - The work at Thwink.org is an effort to help break this impasse by introducing the novel use of a few key tools. This will allow us to take the next step and solve the problem. One of these tools is system dynamics modeling, because buried in the human system is behavior so complex and counter-intuitive it cannot be understood without modeling.

On the left are the core feedback loops of the World3 model of The Limits to Growth. These loops are the ones causing exponential growth and, for most scenarios after a period of overshoot, collapse.

On the right are the core feedback loops of the Dueling Loops model. These two loops appear to explain why the human system has so far been unable to solve the sustainability problem. Fortunately these loops can tell us much more. By expanding the model to include more relevant detail, we can drill down to the fundamental layer of the problem and find its root causes. That data, once refined and confirmed by further research, will lead to solution.

Here's the big picture of what the preliminary analysis at Thwink.org has found. The most important conclusions center on:

The Four Subproblems and Their Root Causes.

Overcoming change resistance is the crux of the problem because as long as the system resists change, the other subproblems cannot be solved.

The root cause appears to be effective deception in the political powerplace. Too many voters and politicians are being deceived into thinking sustainability is a low priority and need not be solved now.

Too many large corporations are dominating political decision making to their own advantage, as shown by their opposition to solving the sustainability problem. This indicates the top two social life forms, Corporatis profitis and Homo sapiens, are improperly coupled. The right feedback loops are missing.

The model of problem solving that governments use to keep problems like sustainability solved has drifted so far from effectiveness that political decision making can no longer solve problems like sustainability.

The world's economic system is excessively degrading the environment. This indicates the economic system and the environment are improperly coupled. The right feedback loops are missing.

The root cause appears to be high transaction costs for managing common property sustainably.

Click a subproblem to drill down.

The great benefit of looking at the problem this way is we can see why we've been unable to solve it. Popular solutions (like carbon taxes, stronger pollution laws, corporate social responsibility campaigns, and promotion of The Three R's of reduce, reuse, recycle) have not come anywhere close to addressing the root causes of the problem. They have instead, as Henry David Thoreau wrote in Walden in 1854, been “hacking at the branches of evil.” These are the intermediate causes. One must instead “strike at the root.”

A more precise analytical approach like this is the future of environmentalism.

Einstein told humanity that "A new type of thinking is essential if mankind is to survive and move toward higher levels." If we are to solve the greatest problem of our time, that new type of thinking requires a complete overhaul of how environmentalism works, one just as radical as when science said goodbye to alchemy and adopted the Scientific Method.

To help you and your organization solve the more difficult problems you're working on, Thwink.org offers:

A set of powerful tried-and-true tools, adapted to fit difficult social problems

The analysis was performed over a seven year period from 2003 to 2010. The results are summarized in the Summary of Analysis Results, the top of which is shown below:

Click on the table for the full table and a high level discussion of analysis results.

The Universal Causal Chain

This is the solution causal chain present in all problems. Popular approaches to solving the sustainability problem see only what's obvious: the black arrows. This leads to using superficial solutions to push on low leverage points to resolve intermediate causes.

Popular solutions are superficial because they fail to see into the fundamental layer, where the complete causal chain runs to root causes. It's an easy trap to fall into because it intuitively seems that popular solutions like renewable energy and strong regulations should solve the sustainability problem. But they can't, because they don't resolve the root causes.

In the analytical approach, root cause analysis penetrates the fundamental layer to find the well hidden red arrow. Further analysis finds the blue arrow.Fundamental solution elements are then developed to create the green arrow which solves the problem. For more see Causal Chain in the glossary.

This is no different from what the ancient Romans did. It’s a strategy of divide and conquer. Subproblems like these are several orders of magnitude easier to solve because you are no longer trying (in vain) to solve them simultaneously without realizing it. This strategy has changed millions of other problems from insolvable to solvable, so it should work here too.

For example, multiplying 222 times 222 in your head is for most of us impossible. But doing it on paper, decomposing the problem into nine cases of 2 times 2 and then adding up the results, changes the problem from insolvable to solvable.

Change resistance is the tendency for a system to resist change even when a surprisingly large amount of force is applied.

Overcoming change resistance is the crux of the problem, because if the system is resisting change then none of the other subproblems are solvable. Therefore this subproblem must be solved first. Until it is solved, effort to solve the other three subproblems is largely wasted effort.

The root cause of successful change resistance appears to be effective deception in the political powerplace. Too many voters and politicians are being deceived into thinking sustainability is a low priority and need not be solved now.

The high leverage point for resolving the root cause is to raise general ability to detect political deception. We need to inoculate people against deceptive false memes because once people are infected by falsehoods, it’s very hard to change their minds to see the truth.

Life form improper coupling occurs when two social life forms are not working together in harmony.

In the sustainability problem, large for-profit corporations are not cooperating smoothly with people. Instead, too many corporations are dominating political decision making to their own advantage, as shown by their strenuous opposition to solving the environmental sustainability problem.

The root cause appears to be mutually exclusive goals. The goal of the corporate life form is maximization of profits, while the goal of the human life form is optimization of quality of life, for those living and their descendents. These two goals cannot be both achieved in the same system. One side will win and the other side will lose. Guess which side is losing?

The high leverage point for resolving the root cause follows easily. If the root cause is corporations have the wrong goal, then the high leverage point is to reengineer the modern corporation to have the right goal.

The world’s solution model for solving important problems like sustainability, recurring wars, recurring recessions, excessive economic inequality, and institutional poverty has drifted so far it’s unable to solve the problem.

The root cause appears to be low quality of governmental political decisions. Various steps in the decision making process are not working properly, resulting in inability to proactively solve many difficult problems.

This indicates low decision making process maturity. The high leverage point for resolving the root cause is to raise the maturity of the political decision making process.

In the environmental proper coupling subproblem the world’s economic system is improperly coupled to the environment. Environmental impact from economic system growth has exceeded the capacity of the environment to recycle that impact.

This subproblem is what the world sees as the problem to solve. The analysis shows that to be a false assumption, however. The change resistance subproblem must be solved first.

The root cause appears to be high transaction costs for managing common property (like the air we breath). This means that presently there is no way to manage common property efficiently enough to do it sustainably.

The high leverage point for resolving the root cause is to allow new types of social agents (such as new types of corporations) to appear, in order to radically lower transaction costs.

Solutions

There must be a reason popular solutions are not working.

Given the principle that all problems arise from their root causes, the reason popular solutions are not working (after over 40 years of millions of people trying) is popular solutions do not resolve root causes.

This is Thwink.org’s most fundamental insight.

Summary of Solution Elements

Using the results of the analysis as input, 12 solutions elements were developed. Each resolves a specific root cause and thus solves one of the four subproblems, as shown below:

Click on the table for a high level discussion of the solution elements and to learn how you can hit the bullseye.

The 4 Subproblems

The solutions you are about to see differ radically from popular solutions, because each resolves a specific root cause for a single subproblem. The right subproblems were found earlier in the analysis step, which decomposed the one big Gordian Knot of a problem into The Four Subproblems of the Sustainability Problem.

Everything changes with a root cause resolution approach. You are no longer firing away at a target you can’t see. Once the analysis builds a model of the problem and finds the root causes and their high leverage points, solutions are developed to push on the leverage points.

Because each solution is aimed at resolving a specific known root cause, you can't miss. You hit the bullseye every time. It's like shooting at a target ten feet away. The bullseye is the root cause. That's why Root Cause Analysis is so fantastically powerful.

The high leverage point for overcoming change resistance is to raise general ability to detect political deception. We have to somehow make people truth literate so they can’t be fooled so easily by deceptive politicians.

This will not be easy. Overcoming change resistance is the crux of the problem and must be solved first, so it takes nine solution elements to solve this subproblem. The first is the key to it all.

B. How to Achieve Life Form Proper Coupling

In this subproblem the analysis found that two social life forms, large for-profit corporations and people, have conflicting goals. The high leverage point is correctness of goals for artificial life forms. Since the one causing the problem right now is Corporatis profitis, this means we have to reengineer the modern corporation to have the right goal.

Corporations were never designed in a comprehensive manner to serve the people. They evolved. What we have today can be called Corporation 1.0. It serves itself. What we need instead is Corporation 2.0. This life form is designed to serve people rather than itself. Its new role will be that of a trusted servant whose goal is providing the goods and services needed to optimize quality of life for people in a sustainable manner.

What’s drifted too far is the decision making model that governments use to decide what to do. It’s incapable of solving the sustainability problem.

The high leverage point is to greatly improve the maturity of the political decision making process. Like Corporation 1.0, the process was never designed. It evolved. It’s thus not quite what we want.

The solution works like this: Imagine what it would be like if politicians were rated on the quality of their decisions. They would start competing to see who could improve quality of life and the common good the most. That would lead to the most pleasant Race to the Top the world has ever seen.

Presently the world’s economic system is improperly coupled to the environment. The high leverage point is allow new types of social agents to appear to radically reduce the cost of managing the sustainability problem.

This can be done with non-profit stewardship corporations. Each steward would have the goal of sustainably managing some portion of the sustainability problem. Like the way corporations charge prices for their goods and services, stewards would charge fees for ecosystem service use. The income goes to solving the problem.

Corporations gave us the Industrial Revolution. That revolution is incomplete until stewards give us the Sustainability Revolution.

This analyzes the world’s standard political system and explains why it’s operating for the benefit of special interests instead of the common good. Several sample solutions are presented to help get you thwinking.

Note how generic most of the tools/concepts are. They apply to far more than the sustainability problem. Thus the glossary is really The Problem Solver's Guide to Difficult Social System Problems, using the sustainability problem as a running example.